An Area of Darkness

‘His narrative skill is spectacular. One returns with pleasure to the slow hand-in-hand revelations of both India and himself’ – The TimesAn Area of Darkness is V. S. Naipaul’s semi-autobiographic ...

‘His narrative skill is spectacular. One returns with pleasure to the slow hand-in-hand revelations of both India and himself’ – The TimesAn Area of Darkness is V. S. Naipaul’s semi-autobiographical account of his first visit to India, the land of his forebears. At once painful and hilarious, but always thoughtful and considered.He was twenty-nine years old; he stayed for a year. From the moment of his inauspicious arrival in Prohibition-dry Bombay, bearing whisky and cheap brandy, he experienced a cultural estrangement from the subcontinent. It became for him a land of myths, an area of darkn